Free Republic

Medicare Payment Board Draws BrickbatsBy Julie Rovner Tue., July 12, 2011 3:00am (EDT) One thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on is that they can't solve the deficit problem without slowing the growth of the massive Medicare program for the elderly and disabled. But here's an irony. Republicans and a growing number of Democrats also seem to agree that they don't like the one aspect of last year's Affordable Care Act that actually would effectively reduce Medicare spending. It's called the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB for short. Republicans hate it. A lot. "I believe it is a rationing...

A toxic political strategy is spreading across the land, one that involves Medicare. It threatens to bamboozle voters and allow the 2012 election to turn on a lie. Democrats are making the obscenely false claim that they will "save Medicare as we've known it." On Wednesday, Democrats used this deceptive strategy to take the special election in the 26th congressional district in western New York. Sadly, this corrupt strategy is likey to be repeated. Voters need to know the facts. The truth is, the Obama health law, passed by Democrats last year, already eviscerated Medicare — though seniors won't feel...

Aaron Titus, a Washington, D.C. lawyer, received a phone call at 4:33am on Wednesday. The automated call informed the lawyer that it was a snow day and schools would be open two hours late. It was a message Titus knew prior to sleeping that night. The next day, Titus, angry at the invasion, decided to get even with the school board. The 31-year-old father arranged for an automated message of his own. By researching a robocall company online, he taped a message and listed phone numbers to various school board members. One of the numbers was to the Superintendent, William...

An examination of both the board of NPR's non-profit foundation and its national board of directors recently found that their members are overwhelmingly - almost uniformly - adherents to various left-wing ideologies. National Review's Matthew Shaffer conducted the examination. He found that "nearly all have demonstrably liberal political sympathies, with heavy support for the Democratic party, pro-abortion-rights groups, and environmental activism in particular." It is important to remember that these two boards do not dictate content. Still, even if their politics are only incidental to NPR's liberal slant, the near-uniformity of their political views suggests that NPR attracts people with...

Germany Accuses US of Indirectly Manipulating Dollar By: Reuters German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle on Saturday took issue with what he called a U.S. policy of increasing liquidity, saying it indirectly manipulated exchange rates. The U.S. Federal Reserve is widely expected to embark on a fresh round of asset purchases to prop up the economy. AP "There was criticism of the American policy of monetary easing, or creating more liquidity," Bruederle said after a meeting in South Korea of finance officials from the Group of 20 economic powers. "I tried to make clear in my contribution to the discussion that...

When it comes to accounting, the devil is in the details. A new Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rule taking effect in December requires greater transparency for union pension plans and threatens to bankrupt organized labor. In order to survive, unions need a bailout and fast. This presents a political problem -- if unions go bankrupt, so do Democrats. Eleven of the top 20 largest political contributors are labor unions, and nearly all of that money is spent campaigning against Republicans. By bailing out unions, Democrats are bailing out themselves. Unions have known for years that their multiemployer pension plans...

Riverside resident Jeff Hall's run for a seat on a local water board has so far been under the radar. He didn't submit a statement about himself for the official voter guide, nor did he attend a candidates forum hosted by the League of Women Voters, and the only way he is represented on the ballot is with his name -- no title or occupation are listed, unlike most other candidates on the fall ballot. Next to nothing is known about Jeff Hall, the candidate. But Jeff Hall, the head of a neo-Nazi group, is well-known in Riverside. As leader...

Ohio - -(AmmoLand.com)- I’m Linda Walker, Central Ohio Chair of Buckeye Firearms Association, and I’m running for the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. I have been part of Buckeye Firearm’s leadership team nearly from the beginning of the organization. I have spent a lot of time in the Statehouse fighting for our Second Amendment Rights through both hearings and meetings. I generally attend every hearing for firearms legislation, which has amounted to hundreds of hours in Ohio’s Statehouse. Part of being on “the team” has entailed attending one-on-one meetings with various State Representatives, Senators and candidates; working...

A Pentagon advisory board is expected to recommend that Defense Secretary Robert Gates eliminate the Joint Forces Command as part of a drive to cut Pentagon bloat. The Defense Business Board (DBB), the Pentagon’s independent board of economic and business advisers, has been tasked by Gates to recommend options for reducing the Pentagon’s overhead, or indirect operating expenses. The board is also expected to offer recommendations on making the Pentagon’s business operations more efficient.

When President Obama was asked by NBC's Matt Lauer why he had not yet called the CEO of BP about the Gulf oil spill, he said he assumed CEO's just told presidents things they wanted to hear. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs had another answer. Gibbs said Obama hasn't called CEO Tony Hayward because -- according to what Gibbs called the "executive structure of corporate governance" -- the CEO alone isn't the final word on company decisions, which are made by the board of directors.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors took a symbolic jab at Arizona Tuesday for passing a controversial law last month that gives law enforcement authorities in the Grand Canyon State broad powers to check a person's immigration status. Critics fear the law will lead to racial profiling. San Francisco supervisors, on a 10-1 vote, approved a nonbinding resolution that calls for a boycott of Arizona-based businesses. It asks for, but does not demand, that city departments refrain from entering into new contracts or extending existing ones with companies headquartered in Arizona, unless severing those ties would result in significant costs...

WASHINGTON: An American doctors organisation has quietly decided to revoke the certification of any member who participates in executing a prisoner by lethal injection.

Huntington Indiana's election board met yesterday evening to discuss the actions of County Clerk Fran Felts. Reported here earlier this week, this meeting was set after an earlier cancellation.

A regulation barring New York City teachers from wearing political campaign buttons in public high schools does not violate their constitutional right to free speech, a federal judge has ruled. Rejecting the teachers' argument that high school students would "spontaneously understand" that the buttons were not part of the curriculum, Southern District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan held that the plaintiffs had "offered no admissible evidence to undermine" the city's argument that "displays of political partisanship by teachers in the schools" could "influence children and impinge on the rights of students to learn in an environment free of partisan political influence."...

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Officials say a Somali national tried to board a commercial airliner in Mogadishu last month with powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe that together could have caused an explosion. The hallmarks bear chilling similarities to the terrorist plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner. Police spokesman Abdulahi Hassan Barise says the suspect was arrested before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines flight departed. It was scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is spending $347 million to construct what they refer to as a “state of the art” brand-new court tower. Yet, many taxpayers are unaware of the details behind this project and the reason why this project continues may be found in the money.Maricopa County is facing a $138.2 million budget shortfall. In response, numerous county employees have been laid off in recent months, including 40 Superior Court employees that would staff some of these offices to be featured in the court tower. Also, county law enforcement has been cut by 15% and Sheriff...

Censorship in Texas: Fighting Academic and Religious Discrimination by James J. S. Johnson, J.D.* "Stop the presses!" That was one of the effects of the decision of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) in Austin, Texas, on April 24, 2008, when the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School (ICRGS) was told that it could not move its 27-year-old Master of Science program to Texas, nor could it recruit students from Texas to apply to its California graduate school. Why? Because ICRGS does not teach science from an evolution-only viewpoint...

Texas Hold ’Em Part III: Calling Ronald Wetherington’s Bluffs About Human Evolution in His January Texas State Board of Education Testimony As a final installment in my “Texas Hold ‘Em” series calling the bluffs of Texas evolutionists, I’d like to highlight one section from Discovery Institute’s rebuttal to Ronald Wetherington’s Testimony before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). Wetherington, who is a professor of anthropology at SMU, testified extensively to the TSBOE about human evolution, his area of expertise. Wetherington stated regarding human origins that we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in...

Natural Selection Studies Based on Bad Statistics March 30, 2009 — Hundreds of studies claiming to show natural selection may be wrong, say scientists from Penn State and Japan.  PhysOrg reported today that “several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.”  Many studies of human evolution have relied on these flawed methods.  If the methods were wrong, the conclusions are unreliable.  “Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences,”...

Using Religion to Suppress Debate on Evolution By John G. West Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute Evolution was back in the headlines this week as the Texas State Board of Education voted 13-2 to require students to "analyze and evaluate" major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations, as well as adopting a critical thinking standard calling on students to "critique" and examine "all sides of scientific evidence." The vote was a loss for defenders of evolution who had pushed the Board to strip the "analyze and evaluate" language from the evolution standards and gut the overall critical...